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Blockchain.info gets hacked

Bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain.info has been the victim of a hack attack on its DNS servers.

It experienced an outage for several hours while under attack, and Peter Smith, the CEO and co-founder, says its internal systems “alerted our infrastructure team who immediately began to assess the attack” but it “became clear the attackers gained access to our accounts through breaching the systems of our DNS registrar”.

As a result, it shut down the entire platform to investigate. Its registrar was able to manually regain control and revert the DNS changes.

Smith says: “We investigated the malicious site to which the attacker had redirected traffic. We determined that due to the attacker using a self-signed SSL certificate, users using modern browsers – which the wallet requires – were prevented from being exposed to the phishing site.

“Due to the quick response of our team, the attacker’s DNS changes were allowed only to propagate partially across the Internet. We were also able to locate the owners of the compromised machine being used by the attackers and have it shut down.”

Its platform is now back online and Smith says it has implemented additional manual, offline controls.

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